New Academic Year Begins without Modern Distance Education system

Baku / 31.08.20 / Turan: On August 29, the Cabinet of Ministers of Azerbaijan announced a decision: from September 15, training in primary school will begin. On October 1 and 15, middle and high school students will start teaching. But if the incidence of coronavirus increases in the fall, full-time education may be stopped again. Even if that doesn't happen, middle and high school students will at times learn online, as they have done this year since early March.

The use of distance learning in vocational lyceums and colleges will continue until October 1, and then again will depend on the incidence of coronavirus: the relevance of distance learning remains for vocational secondary education.

The situation is the same in higher education.

Distance learning will be retained to deal with the situation in the event of a new pandemic. The Minister of Education said that at the request of parents, children cannot attend full-time classes and study remotely. In the event of an increase in the number of infections in schools, both individual classes and schools can be quarantined.

Parents' opinion on distance learning is divided. The interviewed parents of schoolchildren spoke in favor of full-time education. "Distance learning is an expensive pleasure. I have two children, but we do not have a computer at home. Our family cannot afford to buy a laptop yet. Video lessons on TV are good. But, for example, at the end of the last academic year, school teachers arranged an online check. And this created problems. I could not give my smartphone to both children at the same time, and I had to ask teachers to conduct a knowledge survey at different times. For teachers, this is also difficult. There are many children, and they also need to adapt to their parents, "she said a resident of Baku Gunay Ismayilova.

A biology teacher engaged in private tutoring, Farida Agasieva told Turan that there are many parents who choose to study online because they do not need to spend money on daily transportation of their children to school and to a tutor, children do not get tired on the road, they can study with a teacher who is away in the evening, on Sundays and even when they are ill. Many Baku schoolchildren live outside the city, in summer cottages. For them, the daily trips to and from city schools are a heavy burden.

F. Agasieva says that for the first time in many years of her tutoring work, she has gathered groups of students living in distant Azerbaijani regions. Previously, the parents of such children were forced to rent apartments for them in Baku, so that they would prepare for entering a university from the capital's tutors. Now there is no such need. And with the money saved, you can buy a laptop and the Internet.

Parents can choose: Those living away from schools prefer distance learning. But the problem is that the education system is not ready for online learning, even after six months of forced use of distance learning.

In an interview with Turan, an expert in the field of online learning, associate professor of the Pedagogical University named after Tusi Ilham Ahmedov said that in March he had warned the Ministry of Education that the new academic year would be remote, and that it was necessary to prepare for it. But the past five months have not been properly used.

"Now the Ministry of Education is talking about the quality of distance learning (DL), not adopting quality standards for DL. Over the 15 years of participation in the Bologna process, the Ministry of Education has not created a mechanism for managing the quality of its work. Not a single Azerbaijani university has passed the accreditation of the International Quality Agency. The Ministry of Education has created its own similar Agency, but its work is not visible. What can be the quality of online education, if the quality of full-time education in Azerbaijan is low?"Ahmedov asks.

Concerning distance education, he noted that the quality of distance education is measured 1 - by the quality of the electronic education management system, 2 - by the quality of content.

According to the first parameter, there is no experience in the country, we need to develop it for another 10 years. There is experience in the second parameter. It lies in the terrible state of the content and methods of education. I would like to know what the Ministry of Education has done for the content of training, electronic textbooks, methods, and the creation of special portals?

In the best universities of ours, there is no DL system. They say that universities do not have the funds for this. Why do universities abroad earn billions of dollars, and rectors live on their salaries, while in Azerbaijan the university budget is empty, but rectors are billionaires? Because the funds allocated by the state for the development of educational institutions go into the pockets of the bosses, and those who are obliged to monitor the correct spending of funds don’t do that. Therefore, even in the leading Azerbaijani universities there is no preschool education or the existing one is very bad, said I. Ahmedov.

The head of the press service of the Ministry of Education, Jasaret Valehov, in an interview with Turan, agrees that there are problems. But they are in all countries of the world. Valehov's daughter is studying at a university in the USA. He was there in the summer and watched how the university was trying to solve the shortcomings in the content of textbooks, software for distance education, and living conditions of students.

"We instructed educational institutions to improve the content of textbooks, and teachers took special courses on online teaching. Distance education is a new phenomenon for the whole world, and Azerbaijan is not unique in terms of the existing difficulties," the representative of the Ministry of Education concluded.    –0----